E-commerce / AliExpress Russia case study
How AliExpress Russia optimized its retargeting strategy for 11.11
About our client
AliExpress Russia is a leading e-commerce platform. Through its desktop website and apps, small businesses sell a wide range of products to consumers, from clothing and jewellery to toys and garden equipment.
The company has achieved unparalleled success in Russia, with around 61,000 local sellers connecting to its platform in 2020. Together, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region make up one of the biggest app markets on the planet and there are multiple seasonality events throughout the year, all of which have a huge impact on how local and global e-commerce apps run campaigns.
In 2020, AliExpress Russia partnered with us to develop and implement a series of retargeting campaigns for 11.11, the most popular online shopping day in the world. The company was offering discounts between 70% to 80% and required a strategy for encouraging existing customers to visit their app and make a purchase.
We worked with Alexey Sobolev, who is the Senior User Growth Manager at AliExpress Russia. He has been working in digital advertising for over six years and is responsible for AliExpress’s app marketing campaigns in Russia and CIS.
Retargeting is crucial for
e-commerce apps
For users who have provided their ID, retargeting remains a powerful way for e-commerce players to reach out to their audiences when they are on other apps. By analyzing an app’s audience behavior and working with its first-party data, demand-side platforms can create and show individuals personalized ads during peak shopping times, which encourage them to reinstall an app, re-engage with it, or make a purchase.
« Before the promotion, we did a lot of tests with Remerge to find the best strategies for promoting our products. We did a split test, adding two to six products on the creative, and then we chose the best-performing assets to use during the 11.11 sale. »
ALEXEY SOBOLEV, SENIOR USER GROWTH MANAGER, ALIEXPRESS RUSSIA
On top of experimenting with creative templates, we worked with our client to increase the number of products in the feed and were able to scale up to six million items.
Finding the best strategy for AliExpress Russia
AliExpress Russia ran retargeting campaigns for 11.11 with us from July 2020 to November 2020. The aim was to boost the company’s Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) both before and after 11.11 by targeting users who had installed their app up to six months ago but had yet to make a purchase.
In the build-up to the holiday, we experimented with different creatives to identify the best-performing templates for the 11.11 sale. These were designed by our in-house Creative Services team and were continuously optimized based on the performance data we observed.
When asked about the process, Alexey explains, “Before the promotion, we did a lot of tests with Remerge to find the best strategies for promoting our products. We did a split test, adding two to six products on the creative, and then we chose the best-performing assets to use during the 11.11 sale.”
He then adds, “One of the other important things we did during this time was to increase the number of products in the feed. We started with one million and then optimized our internal capacities to scale our feed to six million items. This helped us significantly increase the number of ad impressions. These campaigns showed the biggest ROAS for us.”
100% higher ROAS for 11.11 campaigns
To increase the gross merchandise volume (GMV) during 11.11, we collaborated with AliExpress Russia to create a user segmentation list based on the product categories shoppers were interested in and items that were added to their cart or wishlist. Our analysts evaluated the data and then used the highest performing creatives built during the test phase to target audiences with specific products.
This proved to be an incredible success, with the campaigns showing much higher Click-Through Rates (CTR) and achieving a 100% increase in ROAS when compared to the campaigns that were running before the promotional period.